


Flashover

by athena_crikey



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Angst, M/M, Strip Club of Dr Moreau, The Black Library, Torture, h/c
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-10
Updated: 2016-03-10
Packaged: 2018-05-25 20:14:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6208519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/athena_crikey/pseuds/athena_crikey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peter is taken by the Faceless Man. Thomas deals with the aftermath of the second house of horrors.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flashover

There are some things too awful to remember. It was a lesson I thought I had learned in the Punch debacle – I was wrong. It’s one thing to witness horror, another entirely to live through it. So you’ll forgive me if I gloss over the month I spent in a cell in the newly re-opened Strip Club of Dr Moreau, now located in a dank basement somewhere near the Thames; I could smell it on foggy days. It was the cleanest smell in the horrible, squalid stench; I lived for those days.

Suffice it to say I didn’t wake up one day and expect to meet the Faceless Man on the streets of Soho, but that’s more or less what happened. This time I didn’t make a plucky escape, supported by gunfire and paras. This time I went down hard and fast, and when I woke up there was darkness and steel bars and the stomach-turning smell of vomit and blood.

But I won’t talk about that.

I’ll start in the middle, good old proper _in media res_ , with the day Thomas got me out. It’s one memory I’ll happily never forget.

By that late stage of my captivity, I’d long since stopped screaming. Stopped cursing, stopped begging, even. It was pretty much all I could do to keep breathing: in and out, in and out. Just concentrating on that alone was exhausting, almost enough to burn out the miniscule smear of energy I had left. I’d pretty much given hope of being found before my innards turned to goop or the pain carried me off. No one had found the first dungeon by any action of its prisoners, after all.

We had entered that horror house a few months after first meeting, Thomas and I. Even though the bullet hole in his back was still healing Thomas had cleared it, creeping into the darkness as cautiously as a man edging out over thin ice and disarming the traps within. It had all been done with calm and composure, and a good deal of sweat-filled silence. 

This time he came bursting in in a whirlwind of fire. The roaring flames surged around him in long whip-strands, as though the very air had caught fire from the heat of his rage. Thomas’ magic is all precision and strength, but there’s a powerful beauty to it all the same. The wisps of flame intertwined in a rainbow of colours, not just reds and oranges but hints of blue and green as they swirled about him in a deadly blaze. 

He burned the core out of two demon traps as he came thundering in, incinerated them as if they were paper without once pausing. He crushed a cage that descended on him from the darkness above with the squeal of rending metal, utterly unphased by the failed trap. To his left half the basement flashed over, crates and debris spontaneously erupting into flames. 

There had once been a feline chimera on patrol, but the shattering of glass from the far wall told of his rapid escape at the sight of Thomas striding wrathfully into the room. Now only feet from me, he let the fire die down to tiny floating embers which spun about him like golden fireflies. 

“Peter,” he said, sounding stricken. I tried to find the strength for a smile; it felt like a grimace. 

He melted the lock right off the cell door, liquid metal dripping down in yellow-orange globules to eat away at the floor, and wrenched the door outwards with both hands. 

If I’d had the strength I would have kissed him then, spectators be damned. Our relationship was an open secret, and hardly even that with Thomas storming the battlements like some kind of one-man siege weapon. Or more like an avenging angel, I thought with surprising sentimentality as the final sparks disappeared and left him a dark shadow hovering over me, afraid even to touch me. 

Eventually he did, kneeling down and brushing tender fingers over my forehead. “You’ll be fine, Peter. Just fine,” he said, sounding calmer than he looked. Then, to my shock, he produced a blanket from apparently thin air and wrapped me in it; it was the first stage-magic I had ever seen from him. My dizzy mind, in a haze of pain and weariness, briefly ran up the image of Thomas producing rabbits and doves from hats, a serene smile on his face. I would pay to see that, I decided, while above me Thomas was trying and failing to catch my attention. I finally snapped out of the waking dream enough to see he was really frantic, eyes wide with anxiety. 

I would have liked to say something brave, or witty, or sardonic. In fact, what I said was, “It hurts.” Because Christ it did, and even the idea of Thomas in a tuxedo producing animals from his pockets couldn’t make me forget it for an instant. Couldn’t erase the rolling, searing waves of pain dragging through my innards, like a white-hot rolling pin being pushed back and forth over my viscera. 

“I know, love. It will stop soon. Very soon,” he promised faithfully, looking over his shoulder. 

The paramedics arrived a few moments later with a stretcher; I remember very little of being taken out of the burnt-out remains of the Faceless Man’s second house of horrors. Just Thomas walking beside me, holding my hand as though he would never let it go.

  
***

I woke in an unfamiliar room smelling of must and ancient cigars. I was in a large Victorian bed, complete with drapes and canopy, its ancient oak posts beautifully carved. In one wall there was a large picture window with tapestry drapes, against another a large wardrobe that matched the bed. There were doors in both the left and right-hand walls, dark oak against the cheerful primrose-coloured wallpaper, and a real wood fireplace unlike the little gas arrangements in most of the rest of the Folly. Clearly this room had been decorated sometime before Queen Victoria’s death and never subsequently re-done.

I learned later that Nightingale had refused to let me be taken to hospital, or in fact anywhere other than the Folly where the ancient wards and spells would ensure my safety. Instead I’d been installed in one of the large suites provided once upon a time to the more ancient and senior members of the Folly, men above using shared toilets even of the Folly’s marvelous design. 

At the time, I wasn’t much concerned with the room, or the en suite toilet, or anything other than Thomas who was currently sitting beside me in an upholstered armchair with his head resting against its high back, eyes closed and mouth hanging slightly open. If I’d had my phone and the strength to move I would have taken a picture; it was far and away one of the most endearing poses I’ve ever seen him in. 

I hated to wake him, but my stomach was starting to cramp up and the tendons in my arms and legs were burning. I licked my lips and called him, softly.

He woke at once, startling up and blinking, hair slipping down to fall messily over his forehead; he clearly hadn’t bothered to do anything with it this morning or by the looks of it even to shave, a further mark of his devotion if I needed one. 

“Peter,” he exclaimed warmly, leaning forward to press his hand against my forehead as though taking my temperature. He left it there, cool and smooth, long after he needed to’ve, and I made another attempt at a smile. He must have noticed the pain in my face though because he frowned, thumb smoothing the lines at the edge of my eye. 

“How much does it hurt?”

“A lot less than it did,” I answered, truthfully; I saw a flicker of pain in his eyes before he clamped down on it, expression becoming almost blank. 

“Abdul has been giving you something for it, but he left some pills for you.” He reached out and fetched a bottle from a little end table on the far side of his chair, opening it and tapping out two. He helped me raise my head, put the pills in my mouth, and then fetched a glass of water over from the table and held it to my lips.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt so helpless, for all that he did it with a cool matter-of-factness. 

“What does Abdul say?” I asked quietly when I’d done swallowing down the pills. I had waited for Thomas to put the bottle and glass back so I could watch his face, but he would have made a master poker-player; he gave away nothing.

“He performed some scans when you were first assessed; he’s still interpreting them.”

“Does that mean he doesn’t know what’s wrong with me, or that you don’t want to believe it?”

Thomas’ mouth drew itself into a long, thin line. “Peter,” he began, looking suddenly tired. He sighed, settling his weight further forward in the chair and drawing his hand down to rest over my arm. “You’ve been gone for weeks – determining everything that’s happened, everything that may need treatment… it’s a long list. It will take time. For now, all you need do is rest and recuperate. You will recover.”

Thomas may have had a poker-face to match Daniel Craig, but he was a bad liar. Public school upbringing, doubtless. Under the perfectly calm face, he was scared. More than scared; terrified. Which could only meant that he didn’t know what was wrong with me or, worse, that he did.

But now the drugs were kicking in, my eyelids growing heavy. I didn’t want to sleep, not yet. “Please,” I began, but the drowsiness was overpowering. Thomas leant in and pressed a kiss against my forehead.

“Sleep a little more,” he whispered. 

I did.

  
***

I woke in pain again, a sharper stabbing pain in my gut this time. As I lay in bed, curling around my stomach, I realised I could hear voices in the hallway.

“He needs to be in hospital, Thomas; he –”

“Could you cure him there? Could you do anything for him which you can’t here?”

“I could try to find out what’s _wrong_ with him. With you hiding him away here how do you expect me to treat him?”

“He won’t be safe there. The Faceless Man may not be done with him; I won’t lose him a second time. I can’t live through another month like this last; I will not surrender him again.”

There was a pause, the wooden floor creaking. And then: “I wish you would tell me what you really think, Thomas.”

“He stays here; that is what I think.” 

There was the shuffle of footsteps, and then the door opened. Thomas appeared, face pale with anxiety or anger, his back straight as ever. He crossed the carpeted floor to sit down beside me, only then noticing that my eyes were half-open.

“Peter,” he said, reaching out both hands to take my uncovered one. 

“I never saw her,” I said softly, and saw him freeze. “Not once. I don’t think she knew I was there. That night at Skygarden she stopped him killing me. Why would she –”

“Peter,” he said again, hands tightening on mine. “It does no good to think about it, you –”

I interrupted, voice hard. “You know, don’t you. What they wanted? What he wanted?”

Thomas stared back at me in silence, refusing to give in. I turned to stare up at the canopy; it was navy blue with dusty streaks. Molly have been beavering away on getting the rest of the room cleaned in time for my installation and missed it. 

“I think they needed someone with magic. To test what would happen when he tried whatever cure he’s developed for her. But before he could do that, he had to have something bent, something broken to fix. So he twisted me over and over and over –” my voice broke and Thomas was suddenly there in bed beside me, wrapping his arms around me.

“Hush; it’s over, it’s over. Don’t think about it, Peter. Don’t. Turn your mind away from that place and _don’t let it in_.” He held me tight and I buried my face against his shoulder, a wet patch slowly forming on the perfect herringbone pattern. 

“You can’t fix it, you can’t, can you?” I muttered, voice rough. 

“Of course I can. I will, certainly I will, dear heart.”

I closed my eyes, hands fisting in the wool of his jacket. Lying again.

  
***

The pain grew worse day by day, Abdul steadily increasing my doses of morphine to match it. It left me a worn-out, half-dreaming wreck. I rarely knew day from night, reality from dreams. Thomas was almost always by my side, reading ancient texts feverishly while in the background a fire burned. His suits became blazers, then shirt-sleeves, then finally pyjamas and a dressing coat, his hair growing more and more wild. Sometimes I woke to find him asleep beside me, face worn and troubled even in his sleep. He lay curled on the far side of the bed out of my reach, above the covers with only a thin woollen blanket draped over him, doubtless by Molly.

It felt, somehow, as though he were growing farther and farther away as the days advanced. The world was becoming more and more grey, colour, scent, sound all fading out. Thomas seemed to be losing weight, his cheekbones becoming more pronounced and his suits – when he wore them – hanging loosely over his hollow frame. I was too ill to be worried for him, and too drugged to be worried for myself. It seemed to me that I floated like a glider above the clouds, looking down on the world so far away, and felt completely out of touch with it.

  
***

I woke one night – the curtains were drawn and the fire blazing away – to find Thomas sitting beside me holding my hand. I tried to raise myself up but nothing happened, and for the first time I felt the cold grip of fear closing around my heart.

Thomas looked a complete wreck; his hair had become long and scraggly and was tumbling down into his face, a beard was growing unchecked on his chin, and his white shirt was hanging open at the collar, the cotton unironed and drooping. 

“I’m sorry, Peter,” he whispered, voice hardly audible. 

I shook my head; I had never expected more. He hadn’t been able to help Lesley, after all. 

“I can’t,” his shoulders were shaking, his grip on my hand painful. “I can’t.”

“Thomas…” My mind was too hazy to find the words, even if I had known what to say. 

“It’s what he wants,” whispered Thomas wretchedly, bowing his head to rest it against my hand. 

“What?”

“The library. _That Godforsaken library_ ,” snarled Thomas. He raised his head, rubbing violently at his eyes with his free hand. He looked wild. “God damn us all.”

I’m not sure if I truly understood then, or only came to in hindsight. But it seemed to me at least that I did; that the knowledge in the Black Library might save me. And that Thomas couldn’t bring himself to find out. 

It would be a relief to think that in the face of that awful moral dilemma, I could support him. Or at least empathise with him. In fact, all I felt was a cold wash of fear and pain, as for the first time I really understood what this all meant: I was going to die.

  
***

The next time I woke, I was alone. Thomas’ chair was empty, the fireplace dark and cold. The world felt very distant, painted in monochrome shades of grey. I tried to speak, found I had no voice, and fell into blackness.

  
***

It was much, much later. I don’t know how I knew, but somehow I could feel it – time had passed, and with it some of the pain and exhaustion had melted from my bones. The world no longer seemed in a fog, merely a little blurry around the edges.

I could feel a warm breeze on the back of my neck; I half-turned and found Thomas lying there behind me, asleep. He had crawled in under the covers and was holding me in an unconscious embrace, his face nestled against the back of my neck. He still hadn’t shaved, mousy brown beard prickling at the top of my shoulders. 

I turned further and he twitched, eyes fluttering. A moment later they were open, ice-grey slivers staring curiously at me. His eyes widened and he sat up, half the blankets falling away. 

“Peter!”

I smiled. “Guilty as charged,” I whispered, voice raw.

For a moment he just stared, then he bent to press a careful kiss to my mouth. “Thank God.” He dropped down beside me again, pulling me into a gentle embrace, his body reassuringly solid against mine. 

“What’s happened?” I managed, weak and confused. 

“You’re finally on the road to recovery,” he said, slipping a hand around under my pyjama top to splay over my heart. “You’ll be alright.”

There seemed to me to be more to be said, but I was getting muzzy-headed again, and instead curled back inwards towards his warmth. He drew me in close, pressing soft kisses to the line of my jaw, and I drifted off once more into a deep sleep.

  
***

By the time I woke feeling more or less myself, I really had no idea how long I had been ill for. Everything seemed to have passed in a dream and most of it I could hardly remember. I damn well didn’t regret it.

It was Abdul who was sitting with me when I woke that first time without the heavy blanket of morphine weighing me down; he was reading a Kindle. 

“ _War and Peace_?” I asked, throat dry and gravelly. He looked up, and broke into a smile.

“Hardly anything so elevated. Ian Rankin, if you must know.”

“You don’t get enough mystery in your life?” 

“Occasionally it’s pleasant to imagine a world where cryptopathology is not a necessary skill.” He tucked the Kindle away and turned to me, donning the stethoscope that had been around his neck. I let him listen to my heart and breathing, watched him counting my pulse off against his watch. “That’s all very good,” he said, sounding pleased. “You’re making a promising recovery.”

My heart leapt at that, and I swallowed dryly. “I’m alright?” I asked, genuinely shocked. 

“Of course you are, Peter. Thomas would never have worn anything happening to you.”

I glanced around the otherwise empty room. “Where is he?” I asked, a little embarrassed at my neediness but prickling uncomfortably with it all the same.

“Resting upstairs. He’s hardly slept while you’ve been ill; hardly done anything but read half of his library.”

At the word ‘library’ my mouth fell open; Abdul caught my look and frowned. “You know how he is; nothing to worry about,” he said, misinterpreting my look. “He’ll be down to see you later.”

“Right,” I said vaguely, enveloped in a sudden swell of anxiety.

“I’ll have Molly bring in some soup; you need feeding up.”

I made some inarticulate noise and he disappeared to make good on his promise.

  
***

I can’t say that night I spent alone waiting for Thomas to come down was one of the worst in my life – I can’t now imagine anything taking that title from the long hours I spent writhing in that cell. But it was a tortuous evening all the same. The hours ticked by interminably, the Folly silent around me. I waited alone, hoping he would appear but grimly certain he wouldn’t.

I had assumed, had believed the Faceless Man had been aiming to heal Lesley – atrocious, but understandable. But I knew the truth now, as Thomas had all along. His actions had never been for Lesley’s sake, they had been for the Black Library alone. It had been Thomas, not me he needed to break. Thomas, the only one with the access and means to open the Black Library and bring forth its secrets.

And he had, for me. There was no other explanation for my recovery, or his absence.

I lay there alone in the massive bed, staring up at the streaks of dusk above. Over and over I kept coming back to an image of Thomas standing with his head bowed in the darkened corridor outside the steel doors of the Black Library. It was all I could see, all I could think about, mind battering helplessly against it like a tetherball rounding again and again against its pole. The image was so clear in my mind it was as though I was standing there in the hall with him, feeling the weight of the silence, the draw of the looming steel doors. The clean line of Thomas’ shoulders, slowly crumpling under the pressure. 

70 years protecting that cursed library, and he had finally opened it. 

I buried my head in the pillow, and prayed for sleep.

  
***

Abdul let me get up the next day. Just short trips; to the lav, the window, the other side of the hall. It was more activity than I had had in more than a month and it was simultaneously liberating and exhausting.

I will never again under-value the ability and freedom to simply go to the toilet when I feel like it. 

Thomas didn’t show up to share in this revelation.

  
***

Molly brought my food, and rather touchingly stayed while I ate it. Presumably that was to ensure I didn’t choke on anything, but I appreciated the sentiment all the same.

“Where’s Thomas?” I asked her after dinner. She blinked; Molly always, _always_ knows where Thomas is. It’s an innate, if disturbing, skill. 

Slowly, she glanced down at the floor. I followed her gaze. “The Library?” I asked, softly. She looked up again and drew her head to the side once and back again: No. 

I frowned. There wasn’t much else in the basement, apart from the training labs. “Is he in one of the labs?”

A slow nod. I frowned more deeply; what could he possibly be doing down there? 

And then, for absolutely no good reason, I suddenly remembered Hugh Oswald’s words last summer, speaking of David Mellenby’s escape from Ettersburg. An escape not fated to last long, not after the nightmare of Ettersburg and the horrors that had been uncovered there. _Locked himself in his lab and shot himself_ , Hugh had told me in a shaky voice.

I sat up abruptly, heart suddenly pounding, and swung my feet over the side of the bed. Molly frowned, but I ignored her. “I’m not going far,” I said, stuffing my feet into the slippers that had appeared earlier in the day. 

In fact, I actually wasn’t. The room I’d been put in was handy for the staircase and it was only one flight down to the basement, albeit one that took up far more energy than it should have, with me shuffling down one step at a time like a child. Molly trailed after me, radiating disapproval.

At the bottom of the steps I headed for the usual lab, but Molly ghosted past and kept walking further down the corridor. She passed the roomier empty lab used for work on large spells, and the firing range. Finally, just before the turn of the corner which led to the armory and beyond it the Library, she paused. 

There was a door here I’d never entered before, the usual plain pine of classroom doors throughout Britain with the standard frosted glass panel. Beside it hung a blackboard tablet; one word was written on it in faded chalk: D. Mellenby. 

My vision faded for a moment, heart thrumming deafeningly in my ears; I had to lean against the door frame. But fear drove me on and I found the handle and opened it. “Thomas?” I asked, heart in my mouth, as I stumbled in. Afraid, _terrified_ to see –

Thomas, sitting behind a cheap wooden desk with his head in his hands, screeds of paper stacked on the desk in front of him. He looked up, hollow-cheeked and so raw-looking, as though fear had made him its whetstone. He rose at the sight of me, twitching hand knocking a stack of papers off the side of the desk. He looked down dumbly at it, as though he couldn’t understand what had just happened.

My legs took that opportunity to begin to give out, either in relief or exhaustion, and I staggered over to prop myself up against the wall. Thomas snapped out of his stupor and was beside me in an instant, catching my elbow and helping me to sit down with my back against the wall.

“What are you _doing_ down here?” I asked, when the world stopped spinning. Molly had disappeared in her usual silent way and Thomas was sitting beside me with his legs pulled up like a schoolboy, an arm around my shoulder and his temple resting against mine. 

“I needed to clear up,” answered Thomas in a quiet voice, trying to sound matter-of-fact and failing. His clothes were creased and drooping and smelt of cigarette smoke; he had obviously descended into bad habits while I’d been ill. A brief flicker of imagination provided an image of him sitting at Mellenby’s desk staring fixedly at the pages of old books, a cigarette hanging from his fingers.

I took a glance around the room. It wasn’t a large one; it had only two work tables plus the desk and chair. But the walls were entirely lined with half-height book shelves full of books, journals, scrolls and stacks of paper. Clearly David Mellenby had been widely read. Or written. Or both.

Everything in the room was covered in a blanket of dust. The tables, the floor, the shelves. Everything except a path beaten through it by Thomas, from the door to the desk and in a thin line along the shelves. No one had been in here for years. Decades.

“I’m sorry – I should have come to see you sooner,” he added, sounding chastised. 

“Yes, you should have.” I closed my eyes; the world was still blurred at the edges and it was making me dizzy. “I understand.” That was a wild exaggeration. Exactly what Thomas was thinking, feeling – hell, I couldn’t really pretend to imagine.

Thomas pulled away and I blinked to see him watching me, looking unsettled. “Understand what, Peter?”

I pulled my hands apart, motioning vaguely. “You. The Library. Me. I… I wish it had never happened, that you had never been forced to –”

“Peter,” interrupted Thomas, laying a hand on the side of my neck, thumb stretching up towards my ear to silence me. “I wasn’t forced to do anything. I _haven’t_ done anything. Not about the Library.”

I frowned. “But… the spells – my injuries. You healed them. He wanted you to use the Library to do it – that’s what you thought. Isn’t it?” The world seemed to be turning slowly inside out, everything I thought I knew slipping away.

“It is,” confirmed Thomas. “But he knows only what his master taught him, and his master clearly was one of many who dismissed David Mellenby. I found the answer here, Peter, not in the Library.” He looked to the mess of papers now lying on the ground, ancient and dusty. 

“But then why not see me? Why are you down here hiding like…” I stopped myself, tongue running away with me. But Thomas didn’t seem affected by the words. 

“Can’t you guess?” he asked, voice taut with pain. “Even when you needed me the most, I didn’t break the seal on the Library – couldn’t. Couldn’t bring myself to use the knowledge that came from so much evil, not even to save you. To see you was more than I deserved, more than –”

“Thomas,” I broke in; he stopped. “You found a way without it – that’s all I care about. I wish I had been strong enough to ask you to – to tell you not to use it. If I hadn’t been so ill and exhausted, I would have. You think I want that filth used? I came down because I was afraid you had – afraid what you might have done afterwards. Seeing that room unsealed is the last thing I want.”

Thomas bowed his head, taking my hands and kissing the knuckles. “I’m sorry,” he muttered, sounding miserable. “So sorry, Peter.”

I stared down at him, unhappy and uncomfortable. “Don’t be. Please. Let’s just go back upstairs and… and forget this.”

Thomas looked up, first at me and then around him at the room he had resurrected to save me. The room where, almost 70 years ago, he had found his lover dead. 

“I’m sorry Thomas, I didn’t mean it like that,” I whispered, seeing his face pale. But he shook his head and pulled himself up and me with him, gentle as though handling a wounded bird.

“No. It’s alright.”

I kept silent while he helped me out into the hall, and then back up to my bed. For one thing, I was rapidly running out of strength. For another, I had nothing to say.

  
***

Thomas himself lit the fire in my room that night. Molly brought the wood in but he insisted on building it up himself, kneeling on the hearth and laying out kindling and logs with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. I couldn’t complain; the view from the bed was excellent.

Once he had it properly laid out he tossed a match into it; the fire flared up immediately with unnatural hunger, and for all that I had only caught the faintest curl of magic I knew he had set it ablaze. He came back to me then, pausing momentarily at the foot as though deciding whether to return to his chair or the bed. He chose the latter, rounding the far side and coming to sit down beside me, undoing his shoes and letting them drop onto the ancient carpet before turning to me. 

“He’ll want you back,” said Thomas quietly, laying a hand on my wrist. I slipped it free and took his in mine.

“I’ll be careful. He won’t get the drop on me again.”

“No,” agreed Thomas, although from the glint in his eye I suspected he had far more stringent security measures than simple vigilance in mind. “You’ll need to advance your training. There are spells to increase perception, awareness – you can start on those quite soon.”

“You’re going to load me like a luggage trolly with all this, aren’t you?”

“We’ll see,” he said, in a way that meant yes. But then the hint of a smile on his lips faded, and he pressed my hand. “In all seriousness, Peter, I will not allow this to happen again. Believe me when I say it. You will be safe.” Thomas is usually serious, but rarely so intense. I nodded quietly, and forbore pointing out that he couldn’t protect me from the world – I was a PC, after all. The job came with risks; I had agreed to them when I signed up. Not to mention the considerably higher ones becoming a member of the Folly subjected me to. But Thomas didn’t want to hear that right now, and I wasn’t up for an argument.

“Are you really alright about all this? I mean… about downstairs.” The lab. David Mellenby. They were things I couldn’t say.

Thomas turned to look up at the canopy, frowned as he saw the dust there, a fine line appearing between his eyebrows. “Yes. It’s alright.” He said, slowly. I placed my hand on his shoulder and he turned; he looked sombre, thoughtful. “I’ve grown used to acceptance, Peter. There are very few things left that I truly cannot cross, and most of them are nearly as old as I am. My oath, the Folly, the Black Library. I could never break my promises there. David… I made no promises to him, and in any case he would understand; he wanted his research to be used for good. It was no betrayal, simply a hurt long forgotten. And compounded by my guilt,” he admitted.

“I told you, there’s nothing to be guilty about. Honestly.” I sometimes think Thomas would be happier if he didn’t have so many rigid commandments written into him, some of them contradictory. _Leave no man behind / No one man is worth as much as the cause._ It can’t be easy. 

I let my hand fall, fingers intertwining with his. “Will you stay tonight?”

He smiled, some of the moroseness fading from his features. “Of course.”

I sighed and slipped down between the covers, Thomas watching me while the fire painted flickering streaks of gold on his back. I wondered how long it would be until he and the Faceless Man met, until the showdown. 

I found that I really didn’t know whether to hope for or dread it. 

END


End file.
